Without warning I take him by the neck and shove his head in the toilet. I flush it about five million times, just to keep him from growing up a geek. When he comes up he barely breathes.
“Serves you right,” I tell him. “You can’t go around shoving your head in toilets.”
“But the girl—” he chokes. “And it was funny ! And I thought you’d—”
Not listening, I leave him there. He kneels before the john, choking and crying, looking into the john-hole like a man who’s lost his heart. That night, when I go to bed, I wake to find a candy-bar turd steaming beneath my feather pillow.
I left the church.
Walk fast to your own end.
Past the churchyard the package store stood.
I’ll be there to see you.
I went to it, sprinting, feeling my blood.
Go.
A small Vietnamese woman stood behind the counter. She was young and wore a starched denim dress and had a face that told you how poor she slept. Her hair was long and dimly black and fell in two sickles across her chest and stomach. Behind her on the counter a baby lay sleeping in a worn wicker basket, and beside it a ghetto blaster played rock ’n’ roll for the child to sleep to. The woman looked me over with curious silver-blue shooting marble eyes and didn’t seem to mind that I couldn’t stop staring at her. She grinned and swallowed and ran her fingers across her dress and asked me why I didn’t have my shirt on. I told her I took it off because it was hot.
“Hot,” she nodded, smiling, “yes. It very wahm. It rain, too.” She lifted her hands up over her head and made her fingers flutter. “Like dis, ah hah.”
The baby stirred behind her and she went to it and picked it up.
“He lock stohm, dis one!”
She shook the baby and he began to cry. She stroked him.
“I like storms too,” I told her.
“Ah hah,” she nodded. “Pretty noisy!”
When she went to put the baby back down I reached beneath the counter and grabbed a flask of anything. I put it in the pocket of my pants and could feel it pressing against my leg.
The woman said, “Husband out. Backyahd. You wait fah heem, else I hep you.”
I told her no, I didn’t want anything; I just came in to get out of the storm.
“He still stohm?” she asked.
“No,” I told her. “It’s over, for now. But it’ll start up again.”
She turned back around from the baby and nodded. “Ah, yes, like dis.” She made her hands dance.
“Yes,” I told her. “Uh-huh. Just like that.”
We were quiet for a moment, and I made no move to go. As long as she was facing me I was afraid if I left she might see the bulging bottle. So I stood there, playing the idiot, and asked her how old her child was. “Siss months,” she said, and changed the subject. She reached for a package of sugar wafers and held them up before me. “You hungry? You have eaten? I give you dis, if you wont.”
Before I could refuse she laughed and threw them at me.
“Cookies! Jus’ cookies! You pay back when you got dis.” She held her hand out and rubbed her fingers together.
I took the package and held it over my pocket.
“Thank you, ma’am. Thank you very much.”
I blushed and fawned and turned to go, the cookies in my hand covering the pocket of my pants, but as soon as we’d said goodbye I heard her draw her breath.
“Wot that?” she said. “In yo’ pocket?” She pointed her finger at my pantsleg, angrily, and her shoulders were jerking. “That? Wot that there? You puh eet bahk, p’ease!
She was not screaming or anything, just mad as hell, and I didn’t want to hurt or frighten her any. I put my finger slowly over my lips and with my other hand drew out the knife. She stopped shaking.
“Look,” I told her. I pointed the knife out at her. “You take it. A trade.”
“Nah!” she said, furiously, folding her arms down hard across her chest. “You puh eet bahk rot now, p’ease!”
I told her I couldn’t.
She looked at me.
“I call husband!”
“No,” I begged. “Please.”
To show her I didn’t mean no harm, I went to the counter and laid the knife on it. She picked it up and her face blanched—she must’ve felt some of the blood. She walked calmly to the register and put the knife in it. Her hands rummaged around for something in the back of the cash drawer.
“You puh bahk,” she repeated.
I told her again I couldn’t.
“You puh bahk.”
Her hands kept moving and her eyes were full.
“You puh bahk goddamn rot now!”
She did not point the gun at me but kept it at her side. Inside the store all was silent. The baby had fallen back to sleep and the radio sang gently. All I could hear was the soft breathing noise of the morning outside. I had begun to suspect that the woman’s husband wasn’t there, that she’d only said it as a protection of sorts, and I could see that she was terrified. I did not look at the gun in her hand, and I nodded my head at the backdoor of the store. I shoved a second flask in my free pocket and smiled.
“Call your husband.”
She looked at me.
“Call your husband.”
I took out the second flask and let it shatter on the floor.
“Call him,” I repeated, and she began to cry.
She lifted the pistol slowly from her side, using the strength of both hands to raise it. It was the funniest thing. From where I stood, her arm looked like it wasn’t the thing that was doing the lifting. It was almost as if there were an invisible rope bolted to the package store ceiling, some pulley and chain and unseen hand was hefting to get her to put the gun up at me. I kept looking at her elbow, and it seemed to fight gravity, and her wrist and all her white clenched fingers trembled with some type of terrible weight. When she spoke her voice had a hollow ring to it, as if she’d stepped out of herself or someone else had stepped on in. To do what she had to do, it was clear that someone beside herself had to do it, someone with or without a strength or weakness she usually had or lacked.
“Out,” she told me.
I moved toward her.
“P’ease,” she said, gun pointed straight.
“Call your husband,” I told her, approaching. “Call him if we ain’t got nobody but ourselves.”
I remembered staring at the hole of her mouth as I crossed the floor to her. It did not call for help, or beg a man’s name, or ask any favor. It remained open, slightly, taking in whatever air the small room had to offer, repeating what looked like an unspoken “no” in one-two-three succession. There wasn’t any husband. He’d either died or had left her or had gone off for the morning; he wasn’t in the backyard nor nowhere nearby, and even if he had been, he was far beyond her rescue. By the look on her face I could tell she had next to no one.
“Listen,” I whispered.
Before I went behind the counter toward her, I told her I was going to hang the “Closed” sign up so nobody would come in. I also told her I was going to lock the door in case someone tried to. That was when the noise of her crying stopped. She said “No” once, aloud and wearily, and pointed the gun at the child in the basket. It did nothing; it could not move.
“Put it down! Put it down! Oh God, put it down!”
He is crying below it and maybe I should feed him.
“Put it down! Put it down! Oh God, put it down!”
He gathers me up and he carries me home.
“Put it down! Put it down! Oh God, put it down!” Hold me under forever then. Never let me up.
“Put it down. Please. Oh God, put it down.”
And the baby not stirring as she moved it from its forehead.
“Now, you go.”
“I’ll go, now.”
I’ll be there to see you.
Go.
The stench of the stillborn raindead sky and the sound of my flight as I fled the package store
and the pressure of the bottle in my pocket on my thigh and a knowledge that the death of all living had begun to unravel like string in a young boy’s pocket to collapse like a puppet given scissors and a will to undo itself like hope or the ticking of a clock or the rhythm of the heart beneath the prodding of a knife I thought—
Go.
Past the package store.
Go.
Through the churchyard.
Go.
Past the shelter sheds.
Go.
Through the slickermen.
Walk fast to your own end. I’ll be there to see you.
Going swiftly up the hill I saw a set of soiled clothes, and next to it the mask of a criminal, suffering face of a newsprint fugitive. I could’ve stopped to pick it up, but the tracks felt slick and the voice said Go and faraway I saw the roof and the stoop-shouldered shape of him waiting there.
And I thought to myself, “He has blood written on him.”
And I thought to myself, “It is what I can read.”
And the sky tore in two like the skin of a balloon and I saw him rise and start to run then slow and walk not quickly even. He could see me, halfbrother, falling in the halflight, calling his name in the bleeding of the rain. He could hear, from where he stood, the screaming of the bottle, and see the blood and medicine spread outward on my leg.
Walk fast to your own end. I’ll be there to see you. Go.
And see the blood and medicine spread outward on my leg.
________________________________
He lay on his back bleeding from his thigh.
I took his arm and dragged him from the tracks so the train wouldn’t get him. He had a face like an empty jar and he screamed when I reached into his pocket to take the glass out. I had to leave one piece in because it was too deep for me to remove, and whenever I’d try for it he’d cringe and holler and curse the names of our father and mother. I figured he’d be weak soon enough so I could get it then, and I asked him if he was suffering.
“Man,” he said. “It don’t scare me none.”
I asked him what it was that didn’t scare him any.
“You know,” he said. “Blood. Bones. I got medicine now so it don’t scare me.”
I looked at him and told him it should and he tried to stand and fainted. In the rain the blood ran through his pants like peaked watercolors, and when he awoke I sat on the rail while he watched me. I took off one shoe, rolled the sock down from my knee, and put them both beneath his head for a pillow. His eyes drifted like two dead leaves in altogether different directions.
He said, “I’m leaving now.”
“So long.”
He bit his lip.
“If you come after me—” he threatened, and started to laugh.
I rose from the hill and went to the switchhouse. I looked about for something to cover him with. The rain was light and rapid and warm, but though it seemed to wash him clean it didn’t keep the heat going well through his body. I found a black tarpaulin in the corner of a corridor and I took it up and shook it out and brought it over to him.
“Here,” I said. I draped it across him.
He nodded his head and the chills began to take. I couldn’t see any more of the blood except for that which ran a river down the white pebble hill, and when his body had stopped shaking I asked him if he wanted me to move him to the switchhouse.
“No,” he told me. He asked me to turn the tarpaulin.
I rose and turned it and watched it flutter down. The belly-up side looked like a skinned animal, and it smelled of the sweetness that new blood smells of. I waved at the bugs that had clotted his wound.
“Move,” he told me, twitching beneath the tarp. “Move,” he repeated. “Move the rocks away.”
I lifted his back as best I could and tried to sweep the pebbles from beneath his body, but there were too many and they ran too deep.
“It’s a hill of stone,” I told him. “No matter how far you dig you can’t get nothing else.”
My brother brought his hand, then, slowly to his face. He pressed his fingers to his eyes and I saw the glint of new-pulled glass between his thumb and palm. “Liar,” he whispered, holding his breath; and the blood began to pour. It ran beneath the tarp like a dead red river and spilled across the rocks like wine from a broken cup. As I knelt beside his body taking in his eyes, I felt it wetting my feet and hands, and when his face and the arch of his chest had fallen, I left him on the hill and went up to the tracks.
I could hear them laughing as I lay across the rails. One was the pregnant girl who’d made fun of the waterspouts. The other was the younger one who’d chased her across the old port barge. They were dressed in summer dresses and moved idly through the weeds, and they did not stop to watch my brother bleeding on the hillside. They moved onward, simply, as if they had somewhere to go, and their laughter followed me down into the darkness where I knew it would not be long, nor uneasy, nor anything other than what I had to finish.
From where I lay I could see my brother. He was broken, and bleeding, and wore my father’s features.
I was dead set against him going, but there was nothing I could do.
Daniel Vilmure was born in Tampa, Florida, in 1965, and graduated from Harvard. Life in the Land of the Living is his first novel.
A NOTE ON THE TYPE
This book was set in Granjon, a type named in compliment to Robert Granjon, type cutter and printer, active in Antwerp, Lyons, Rome, and Paris from 1523-1590. The face was designed by George W. Jones, who based his drawings on a type used by Claude Garamond (c. 1480-1561).
Composed by
Adroit Graphic Composition Inc.,
New York, New York
Printed and bound by Fairfield Graphics,
Fairfield, Pennsylvania
Designed by Marysarah Quinn
Daniel Vilmure was born in Tampa, Florida, in 1965, and graduated from Harvard.
Life in the Land of the Living is his first novel.
Jacket art by Scott Reynolds
Jacket design by Sue Keston
ALFRED A. KNOPF, PUBLISHER,
NEW YORK
Life in the Land of the Living Page 19